The runaways were still there. Kate Flanahan crept up with the others, near the edge. The word passed among their crouching ranks. Vandermeer armed the projectile gun with the gas cannisters, aimed at the access of the mound they faced. And right in front of them a pair of the fugitives sat naked, sunning their bony, muddy limbs.
Of the calibans, no sight; and that was just as welclass="underline" less confusion. Jones put the safety off his rifle, and Flanahan did the same, the sweat colder and heavier on her with the passing moments. Those ragged creatures down there, those fugitives from all that was human, they had hurt Jane…had humiliated her; had cared nothing for what they did, for their pleasure; and Jane would never be the same. She wanted those two. Had one all picked out.
“Move,” the order came from Jones; and they did as they had arranged, pasted a few shots near the visible fugitive, came down the slope. Flanahan whipped off a shot, saw the taller of the two go down like he was axed.
And then the ground pitched underfoot, went soft, slid: there were outcries. One was hers. Trees were toppling about them. Of a sudden she was waistdeep in earth and still sliding down as the whole slope dissolved.
She let go the rifle, used her hands to fight the cascading earth; but it went over her, pinning her arms, filling her mouth and nose and eyes; and that and the pressure were all, pain and the crack of joints.
xi
So they failed. Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez understood that when her father came to her to break the news…but she had understood that already, when the radio had been long silent, and the rumor went through the Camp. She took it quietly, having abandoned the thought that her life would proceed as she wanted. Little surprised her.
Her father settled into silence. His calibans went unhunted, after all; but Kate was gone, and calibans had killed her. He smiled very little, and a slump settled into his shoulders in the passing months.
He offered to have the doctors rid her of it, the swelling presence of the child in her belly; but no, Jane said, no. She did not want that. She paid no attention to the stares and the talk among the youths who had been her friends. There was herself and her father; there was that…and the baby was at least some of Kate Flanahan; some of her father, too; and of whatever one of the lostlings had sired it.
When it came she called her daughter Elly–Eleanor Kathryn Flanahan, after her mother: and her father took it into his arms and found some comfort in it.
Jane did not. Jin’s daughter, it might be; or one of his brothers’. Or something that had happened beneath the hill. She fed it, cared for it, saw a darkhaired girl toddling for her father’s hands, or going after him with smaller paces, or squatting to play with Ruffles–at this she shuddered, but said nothing–Elly followed her grandfather everywhere, and he showed her flitters and snails and the patterning of leaves.
That was well enough. It was all Jane asked of life, to keep a little peace in it.
The fields went smaller. The azi who had fled did some independent farming, over by the cliffs, so the rumor ran. Gallin died, a cough that started in the winter and went to pneumonia; that winter carried off Bilas too. They went no longer outside the Camp–the Calibans came here, too…made mounds on the shore, between them and the fishing; and only that roused them to fight the intruders back.
But the calibans came back. They always did.
Jane sat in the summer sun the year her father died, and saw Elly half grown–a darkhaired young woman of wiry strength who ran with azi youths. She cared not even to call her back.
That was the way, at the end of it all, she felt about the child.
xii
Year 49, day 206 CR
There were more and more graves–of which the born‑man Ada Beaumont had been the first. Jin elder knew them alclass="underline" Beaumont and Davies, Conn and Chiles, Dean who had birthed his son; Bilas and White and Innis; Gallin and Burdette, Gutierrez and all the others. Names that he had known; and faces. One of his own sibs lay here, killed in an accident…a few other azi, the earliest lost, but generally it was not a place for azi. Azi were buried down by the town, where his Pia lay, worn out with children; but he came here sometimes, to cut the weeds, with a crew of the elders who had known Cyteen.
So this time he brought the young, a troop of them, his daughter Pia’s children and three of his son Jin’s; and some of Tam’s, and children who played with them, a rowdy lot. They trod across the graves and played bat‑the‑stone among the weeds.
“Listen,” Jin said, and was stern with them until they stopped their games and at least looked his way. “I brought you here to show you why you have to do your work. There was a ship that brought us. It put us here to take care of the world. To take care of the born‑men and to do what they said. They built this place, all the camp.”
“Calibans made it,” said his granddaughter Pia‑called‑Red and the children giggled.
“ Wemade it, the azi did. Every last building. The big tower too. We built that. And they showed us how, these born‑men. This one was Beaumont: she was one of the best. And Conn–everyone called him the colonel; and he was stronger than Gallin was… Stop that!” he said, because the youngest Jin had thrown a stone, that glanced off a headstone. “You have to understand. You behave badly. You have to have respect for orders. You have to understand what this is. These were the born‑men. They lived in the domes.”
“Calibans live there now,” another said.
“We have to keep this place,” Jin said, “all the same. They gave us orders.”
“They’re dead.”
“The orders are there.”
“Why should we listen to dead people?”
“They were born‑men; they planned all this.”
“So are we,” said his eldest grandson. “We were born.”
It went like that. The children ran off along the shore, and gathered shells, and played chase among the stones. Ariels waddled unconcerned along the beach, and Jin 458 shook his head and walked away. He limped a little, arthritis setting in, that the cold nights made worse.
He worked in the fields, but the fields had shrunk a great deal, and it was all they could do to raise grain enough. They traded bits and pieces of the camp to their own children in the hills–for fish and grain and vegetables, year by year.
He walked back to the camp, abandoning the children, avoiding the place where the machines that had killed Beaumont rusted away.
Some azi still held their posts in the domes, and the tower still caught the sun, a steel spire rising amid the brush and weeds. Flitters glided, a nuisance for walkers. Ariels had the run of all the empty domes in maincamp, and trees grew tall among the ridges which had advanced across the land, creating forests and grassy hills where plains and fields had been. Most of the born‑men had gone to the high hills to build on stone, or their children had. In maincamp only the graves had human occupants.
He was old, and the children went their own way, more and more of them. His son Mark was dead, drowned, they said, and he had not seen the rest of his sons in the better part of a year. Only his daughter Pia came and went from them, and brought him gifts, and left her children to his care…because, she said, you’re good at it.
He doubted that, or he might have taught them something. The shouts of children pursued him as he went; they played their games. That was all. When they grew up they would go to the hills and go and come as they pleased. Himself, he kept trying with them, with life, with the world. This was not the world born‑men had planned. But he did the best he knew.
V
OUTSIDE
i
Excerpt, treaty of the new territories
“Union recognizes the territorial interests of the Alliance in the star systems variously named the Gehenna Reach or the MacLaren Stars; in its turn the Alliance will undertake to route fifty percent of trade with these systems through Union gateway ports after such time as a positive trade balance has been achieved;…further…that the defense of these territories will be maintained jointly by the terms of the Accord of Pell…”